Google Extends BigQuery Reach Across Europe

George Leopold

Google Cloud is extending the reach of its BigQuery data warehouse deeper into Europe, enabling users to store data and perform analytics in the countries where they operate.

Regional availability of data storage and analytics was introduced in London this week with a phased rollout across Europe scheduled for later in the year, Google announced during a company event in the British capital on Wednesday (Oct. 10). The new regions will include Frankfurt, Germany, and Finland. BigQuery was already available across the European Union.

Expansion of BigQuery services in the Tokyo region was announced in April.

Regional availability means “customers can run BigQuery workloads in the same Google Cloud regions they already use for storage, compute, and machine learning, to meet their specific needs,” Google said. Those requirements include compliance with data governance rules such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that took effect in May.

When querying data, Google said its data warehouse platform determines the appropriate location to run the query based on data sets referred to in the request. Users can also specify the location where a query should run. The platform returns an error message if the specified location does not match the region where the requested data sets are stored.

Along with European expansion, Google said it plans to expand in Asia beyond its current Tokyo region to include: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mumbai, India; Singapore; and Sydney, Australia.

The expansion of its SQL processing platform is part of a larger Google initiative to expand its enterprise cloud initiative across Asia and Europe as more companies embrace multi-cloud strategies for data analytics and other big data applications that are migrating to the cloud. Over the last 18 months, Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has launched four new cloud regions across Europe, including Finland, Germany, London and the Netherlands.

The European expansion has also been driven by GDPR data compliance requirements. Google added a set of cloud updates earlier this year for complying with GDPR, including a data portability capability designed that allows business users to securely download business intelligence data.

The cloud provider also is offering European customers default encryption for data at rest.

In July, Google announced the beta release of BigQuery ML. The platform is designed to allow developers to create and run machine learning models in BigQuery using standard SQL queries.